


nothing but you

by Kypros



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Divergence - Post-Season 1, Comedy of Errors, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Fake/Pretend Relationship, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Office Culture, Period-Typical Homophobia, The 90s, in the making
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:47:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24172288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kypros/pseuds/Kypros
Summary: It starts like this: it is possible, in 1994, for an office party work function in Indianapolis to be the absolute bane of one’s existence.After a night of heavy drinking, Jonathan Byers is out in his office. And according to Marg around the water cooler the next Monday morning, he is also engaged to Steve Harrington. They are going to dinner with her and her husband next Saturday. Marg wants to hear about their wedding plans.It starts like this, and Jonathan is quietly dying.
Relationships: Jonathan Byers/Steve Harrington
Comments: 13
Kudos: 50





	1. you can't always get what you want

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dicktective](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dicktective/gifts).



> Canon divergence post season one; all else will be revealed in its own time.

It starts like this:

The sun came out after Jonathan first kissed a man and his world went from stereo to mono. Everything synced together. There were no more separate channels. No more dichotomy of voices whispering wildly against each other, filtering through disjointedly on either side of his headphones. Let’s live a new life in New York City. Let’s kiss more men. Let this be the time he finally gets to live for himself and not for his family.

—

It is possible, in 1994, for an office party work function in Indianapolis, Indiana to be the absolute bane of one’s existence. Dress semi-casually, but not too casually. Make sure your tie is pressed and slacks freshly dry cleaned. Feel weirdly alienated around the office water cooler in the weeks leading up to the huge soirée, avoiding topical conversation about one’s homelife and relationships. Gerald in the editing department is good to talk to about the recent happenings in the music world— _Cobain? What a fucking loss, man_ —but has been notoriously vitriolic in terms of talking about the AIDs crisis in a way that doesn’t make sense or mesh with his otherwise laidback personality. Wanda at the front desk is a mixed bag: she talks about an uncle who is gay, but always in hushed tones and speaks the word ‘homosexual’ as if it is foreign to her tongue. Jonathan just nods— _Oh, yeah, I know someone who is gay, too_ —but doesn’t tell her who.

So a lot of the time he just listens. He listens to Frank who works with him in photography mention a son who ran off with some boy he went to highschool with. He doesn’t seem angry, just sad. He listens to Elizabeth in publishing, the one with too many facial piercings who sometimes wears decidedly not office appropriate work attire, slyly gush about the pride parade last year—it was a lot of fun, it seems—but nothing like the one in San Francisco. He listens to Max, the office mail lackey, tell that shit-talker, Dave in media-relations to ‘fuck off’ when he snickers about how ‘gay’ his hair is for being so long. For the record, Jonathan doesn’t think Max is gay—his hair is long because he rides a longboard to the office and occasionally shows up sporting a new tattoo—but Dave seems to think anything beyond a traditional, tightly combed coiff is bucking against the hetronormative narrative he has been raised to believe in.

For the record, Jonathan doesn’t look gay, at least according to Dave’s standards.

Jonathan’s hair, while still slightly shaggy, gets trimmed every six to eight weeks and he tries his best to keep it neat. Sometimes he forgets and ends up cutting the hair out of his eyes with his kitchen scissors, but if it looks bad, nobody says a word. Like everyone else, he wears a white, lightly pressed dress shirt (his probably being less starched than most) and a nondescript tie. His are never flashy like Frank's, who seems to have a hobby in collecting the most tackiest ties in existence. Pants are again nondescript—black, or brown, or sometimes grey—but when he’s on assignment, he sometimes ditches the tie and dress pants and gets away with just wearing jeans with his shirt untucked. Nancy sometimes teases him when he shows up back at the office like this, because he supposedly looks like a teenage punk again, and her comments have started a rumor that the two of them are dating.

They’re not. And when the head of the neighbouring department, Marg, is assured of this, she not so subtly suggests that he take her newest hire, Heather, to the party with him.

Office parties are supposed to be endless vistas, free drinks giving away to loose bodies and looser tongues. They offer the best of both worlds, where you can see that normally uptight asshole in accounting do something ridiculously stupid like dance the electric slide and somehow feel better about nodding to him each morning as you walk by his desk. You can hear Trish talk about her secret date with Benjamin and how they ran into Simon from HR, and learn that Cal is retiring soon, _but shh, it’s a secret_. Cake and refreshments served in the breakroom next Friday at 1 P.M. sharp.

You also get to meet each other’s partners.

You can say ‘hi’ to Frank’s dowdy, overweight wife again for the fourth year in a row and let her talk about their golden retriever, Sandy, for twenty minutes before politely excusing yourself. There is Wanda’s husband, whose name you can never remember, which is fine because he keeps to himself and always drinks way too much anyways. You can see Gerald sneaking out for a smoke with Max, and maybe you might go with them, except Liz breaks into your line of sight and introduces you to her girlfriend, a pretty young blonde thing named Laura. Last year, Laura had been Val. Before Val, there had been Susan. But mostly you hover next to Nancy, letting people assume you are a de facto couple and make sly conversation about how Dave showed up dateless again, despite the fact that neither of you really had a date either.

This year, however, Nancy does have a date. A real one. She is seeing someone called Stuart—a fancy Wall Street lawyer-type she met when she had to interview him for some op-ed piece—and Marg wants you to take her newest intern, Heather.

“I—I can’t,” Jonathan stammers out and both Marg and Heather look at him curiously, a twitch in Heather’s already pouted lips.

“ _Oh?_ ” says Marg.

“I’m seeing someone,” Jonathan explains, and Marg smiles widely, her elation practically disappearing behind the crinkle of her half-lidded, middle-aged eyes.

“Then we can’t wait to meet them this Saturday!” she exclaims and Jonathan just nods, thinking her voice sounds deceptively sweet like rancid honey.

He later finds out that Heather cried in the second floor washroom for the rest of the afternoon, humiliated, and that Marg had told practically everyone about his mystery date who wasn’t Nancy, and _oh, isn’t this exciting?_

—

It ends like this:

Jonathan wasn’t actually seeing someone.

Instead what he gets is Nancy, pulling in favour, and setting him up with a fake date to take to the function.

“It’s 1994, Jonathan,” she practically sighs. “Almost ‘95. The world is different now. Liz is out at the office, so why can’t you be?”

Jonathan doesn’t mention Gerald’s weirdly acerbic comments about the March on Washington in 1987, or how Dave still likes to take pot-shots about Max’s hair being tied back past his shoulders, but agrees to anyways because honestly he really is tired of it. Of the meaningless small talk and sitting alone in the dark room with Frank, trying to remember the fake names of fake women who he took on fake dates as Frank fiddles with his tie, pushing it over his shoulder so it doesn’t dip into the trays of metallic, sour smelling chemicals, asking genially how things with that last girl he took out with went.

It ends like this:

He wakes up the morning after the company's anniversary party in bed next to Steve Harrington, a guy who he hasn’t seen since graduating high school nearly a decade ago.

There is a moment of panic when he realizes that _oh, shit, we don’t have clothes on_ and _oh, shit, Harrington is gay?_

Jonathan sits up, with fuzzy memories of joint, candidly told lies about their fake relationship made easier with each and every drink they had consumed and tries to make sense of it all.

It takes him a moment to find his clothes and it’s only when he considers waking up Steve to ask for some clarification on how they were going to maneuver this unfortunate situation in the future, that the body laying motionless in the bed speaks.

“I’m not gay, Byers,” Steve tells him shakily, his voice sounding thin and like it’s going to crack. But all Jonathan can see is his backside, his body curled towards the wall. “You are. But I’m _not._ ”

Jonathan just looks at him. He thinks he should feel something. Anything. Instead it’s just the perusal pang of disappointment as he realizes, _great—I’m dealing with another closeted straight guy_ and his patience runs thin.

“That’s funny,” he says, and his voice is quiet as he buttons up his shirt. “But I seem to remember your lips doing something that wasn’t exactly the epitome of straight.”

It ends like this:

There is a sharp suck of air and and a quiet sigh, followed by a resigned sounding, “Can we just...pretend this never fucking happened and move on with our lives and never see each other again?”

Jonathan wholeheartedly and emphatically agrees, because sleeping with Steve Harrington, douchebag extraordinaire, had never been part of the plan. He was more than content to go back to his normal existence—one where he hadn’t thought much about the asshole since he left for university back in 1987, and even if Nancy occasionally mentioned him from time to time, he was also more than content to tune out the details, much like he had during his teenage years. Because there’s some things that people say and do that you just can’t come back from.

It didn’t matter that Steve had saved his life. It didn’t matter that he apologized for all the awful, nasty terrible things he had said about his family. It didn’t matter that Nancy broke up with him. It didn’t matter that Nancy eventually reconciled their friendship and later tried to force a relationship between the two of them. It didn’t matter because Steve Harrington was and always will be that guy who sneered in his face when his kid brother went missing and had the audacity to laugh about it, spreading rumours around the school with his shitty friends that he had killed him.

And then he got really drunk at an office work party a decade later with Steve as his fake date, received a sloppy blowjob, and woke up in bed next to him.

It was a perfect way to start off the beginning of his mid to late twenties.

God, what a mess.

“Yeah,” is all Jonathan eventually says, grabbing his tie off the floor near the door. “I’d prefer it that way, actually.”

“I would have left first,” is what comes next. Steve’s voice is still speaking to the wall. Still small and quietly disgusted. “But I live here.”

Jonathan doesn’t respond, and when he’s greeted at the office water cooler on Monday morning by an overly enthusiastic Marg, beaming as she gushes about how _cute_ and _funny_ his fiancé is, Jonathan feels the sun disappear from his life. The channels in his brain switch back to stereo from mono.

“And I just can’t wait,” Marg chatters, her pearly white teeth with the smudged lipstick threatening to swallow him whole.

“For what?” Jonathan asks, and if he sounds confused, it’s because he just found out he’s apparently engaged.

“For our dinner next Saturday, Jon!” the woman trills. “You’ll _have_ to get Steve to tell that story again to my husband about how you met. And the engagement? How wonderfully romantic!”

Jonathan swallows back his paper cup of water nervously and just nods.

It starts like this and it is 1994.

Jonathan Byers is out in his office, and according to Marg—head of the neighbouring department next to photography—engaged to Steve Harrington. They are going to dinner with her and her husband next Saturday. Marg wants to hear about their wedding plans.

It starts like this and Jonathan is quietly dying.


	2. but if you try sometimes

It gets worse before it gets better.

Jonathan likes Nancy because she is everything that other women aren’t. Intelligent and willing to show it, cunning (and not-so-willing to show it), pretty and stern. She is more responsible than any of the people he knows; more adult than most adults. Jonathan likes her because he likes her. That’s pretty much all there is to it, really. In a different reality, in a different lifetime, he might have married her. He might have gotten down on one knee and promised her the world; promised her the white-picket fence with the GMC company car and the 2.5 kids, whispering sweet nothings about the American Dream into his hometown sweethearts’ ear.

But what Nancy lacks in naiveté, she exceeds in bitterness and she would be the first one to remind him that it’s called a dream for a reason and that you have to be asleep in order to believe it.

It’s Monday afternoon, just past lunch, and his dream girl from his dream life is giving him a dead-eyed stare and a guttural hiss as he asks her for Steve’s number, because _what have you done, Jonathan?_

 _“Me!?”_ he hisses back in equally quiet tones so Nancy’s cubicle neighbour, Sally, can’t hear. “ _Nothing!_ I can’t even remember getting home that evening; I just need his number Nancy—”

“—The entire office thinks you’re _engaged!_ ”

And oh, this could go on forever, but Nancy eventually relents, fingers flipping through her rolodex and scribbling down the digits for one ‘S. Harrington’ onto a bright pink post-it note.

“ _Fix_ this,” Nancy hisses, and it’s more of a threat than it is a command.

“I’m _trying_ ,” Jonathan hisses back and then Max shows up with his mail cart and both of them smile, _hi Max, hi Max, hi, Nancy, hi Jonathan_ and Jonathan grabs the pink post-it note and runs.

—

And here is where the worse comes in:

“What did you tell them?” Jonathan practically seethes into the receiver and there is radio silence, just an empty phone line and a slight, rattly cough before the expectedly bewildered: “ _What?_ ” rings out loud and clear.

“At the office party,” Jonathan clarifies, and if he could strangle Steve through the receiver, he would. “What did you _tell_ people?”

A confused: “I don’t know—that we were dating? That was the plan, right?”

“Then why does my entire office think that we’re _engaged!?_ ”

Again, there is radio silence and the ticking of a clock and Jonathan squeezing his eyes shut tight before the second expectedly bewildered: _“What?”_ rings out loud and clear.

“We agreed to have dinner,” Jonathan explains, trying his hardest to keep his voice from shaking. “This Saturday. With Marg.”

“ _Marg?_ ” Steve coughs out.

“Marg,” Jonathan repeats. “The woman from our table at the party, remember?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well neither do I!”

“Fuck,” Steve says.

“Yes,” Jonathan agrees. “And she wants you to tell the story again about our ‘wonderfully romantic’ engagement,” he hisses.

He thinks he can hear Steve choking.

“You can’t be serious,” Steve finally manages, voice incredulous.

“I am very serious,” Jonathan reiterates.

“Well, I’m not going,” Steve tells him as a matter-of-fact and Jonathan’s fingers squeeze around the receiver as he imagines it to be Steve’s neck.

 _“Steve_ —,”

“Tell Marg something came up. We can’t make it. Or better yet, tell them we broke up. Tell them I died. Goodbye, Jonathan.”

The phone line goes dead and Jonathan exhales, staring down at the pink post-it note with Nancy’s neat printing. He stares at it, picks up the receiver, and dials the number again.

—

But just when you think you’ve reached the bottom, you haven’t.

“We can’t make it,” Jonathan says on a Tuesday with a polite smile directed towards Marg, filling up his paper cup and avoiding all eye contact with everyone around the water cooler.

There is a punctuated gasp and the fretting of too many ‘ _oh no’s_ as Jonathan dares to look over at the older woman. He thinks Marg might actually cry.

“Steve came down with the flu,” Jonathan continues to explain and Dave chimes in with:

“In September?”

Jonathan has never hated Dave more.

“That’s _terrible_ ,” Marg gushes. “Oh, absolutely terrible. Tell Stevie to drink lots of fluids. And have you made him soup? I could make him some soup, Jonathan, dearie—,”

“—it’s fine,” Jonathan clips out. “I brought him some last night. But, _uh_ , thank you.”

He did not bring Steve soup last night. Steve did not have the flu. Steve had disconnected his phone after Jonathan’s fourth call in a row and Jonathan had wanted to scream.

“That poor thing,” Marg continues to simper and Jonathan nods, taking a sip from his water. Then Dave says:

“I’ve never heard of someone getting the flu in September.”

“Steve frequently gets sick,” Jonathan smiles, and his lips have never felt tighter.

“Dalton is the same way,” Marg tells him, smiling sympathetically. “I told him all about you and Steve; he told me we should break out the good china and pop some bubbly. Dalton never likes to eat on the good china, so you know he was looking forward to it. But it’s okay, Jonathan, we’ll just have to reschedule. How does next Saturday sound instead?”

Jonathan chokes on his water, spilling dribbles of it down the front of his shirt and tie and Dave smacks him on the back.

“Careful there, Johnny—can’t have you dying on company time. The guys over in head office would have an absolute fit.”

—

The dream girl from his dream life is giving him another dead-eyed stare and a guttural hiss as he asks her for Steve’s address, because _what have you done, Jonathan? I thought I told you to fix this?_

He thinks he should try explaining to her that he doesn't remember where Steve lives, only that it's near the Bowerman Mall: he took a cab home on the weekend, incredibly hungover and probably still half-drunk. 

He doesn't tell her this. 

Instead he hisses back a quiet, "I _tried,_ " because Sally is a busybody in the same way Marg is, and oh, here’s Max again with the mail. _Hi Max, hi Max, hi Nancy, hi Jonathan._

“How is rescheduling a dinner with Marg _fixing things,”_ she whisper-yells back as Max disappears from sight, her manicured fingertips flipping through her rolodex.

“I don’t know—I told her Steve had the flu and it’s not like he had any better ideas because he hung up on me—,”

“—he hung _up_ on you?”

“He told me to tell everyone he had died.”

“ _Idiots_ ,” Nancy practically seethes as she scribbles down an address on another bright pink post-it note. Her writing is less neat this time. “Both of you are _idiots._ Fix this, Jonathan, or I will.”

Jonathan swallows nervously, grabbing the second post-it note out of Nancy’s hand and nods. He doesn’t trust Nancy to fix things. It was Nancy’s idea to set him up on a fake date to begin with. It was Nancy’s idea for that fake date to be Steve. A favour, she said. Steve owed her a huge, huge favour.

At 5 o’clock, the office empties out and Jonathan turns right out of the car park instead of his usual left.

Dave pulls up next to him, waving at him from his shiny, black Honda Accord and Jonathan plasters on a fake smile and waves back.

—

Steve lives in a 3-story walkup apartment complex and of course he’s on the third floor, but that doesn’t matter because Steve won’t buzz him in and he’s currently arguing with a crackly voice over an intercom.

“I’ll call the cops, Byers,” Steve’s voice crackles through. “I mean it!”

“ _Steve_ ,” he stresses into the speaker, finger jamming against the button hard. “You are the one who fucked this all up. You have to help me _un_ fuck this.”

“Hear this, Byers?” There’s a slight rustling sound, followed by a distant sounding dial tone. He can only imagine Steve has shoved the phone's receiver up against the intercom. “This is me picking up the phone.”

Jonathan sucks in a deep breath of air and tries not to draw blood as his teeth bite down onto his lower lip.

“I know about the favour,” he lies.

The intercom stops its crackling and the sound of the distant, beeping dial tone disappears.

Jonathan stands, staring at the intercom for 3 whole minutes and he’s just about to give up and go home before it picks up again.

“Who have you told?” Steve’s crackly voice quietly asks and Jonathan blinks.

“Nobody.” The word pops out of his mouth easily because it’s the truth. He doesn’t know what the favour is and he can’t tell what he doesn’t know.

There’s a heavy sigh that sounds more like static followed by what sounds like a loud _thump_.

“One dinner,” is what Steve grits out. “We’ll do one dinner with _Marg_ and her husband and you’re never going to speak about the favour or what happened to anyone ever again. Got it, Byers?”

Jonathan nods even though Steve can’t see him, his finger pressing against the button one final time.

“Okay,” he agrees and the intercom goes dead.

The worst of the worst, however, is yet to come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, everything's a mess. Jonathan is a mess. Steve is a mess. Office life is a mess. This is a mess. Thanks for the love so far! I promise things will make more sense in the future! <3


	3. well, you just might find

He isn’t expecting to see or even _talk_ to Steve until Saturday (the date is marked in his day planner, circled in bright red pen and scrawled across with a messy _Dinner with Marg!_ ), so it comes as a surprise to him when on the Thursday beforehand he gets a phone call at precisely 5:33 pm, the unimpressed voice of Steve Harrington bursting through the phone line.

“God, _finally,_ ” he says. “I’ve called you like six times already.”

Jonathan hasn’t even had time to loosen his tie from walking in the door and the sound of Steve’s voice, heavy with demand, already has him sighing.

“And don’t give me that attitude, _Byers,_ ” Steve snipes. Jonathan cradles the receiver between his shoulder and his neck and tries not to sigh again, but the sound comes out anyways.

“Dinner’s not till Saturday, _Steve_ ,” Jonathan reminds him and he takes a moment to loosen his tie.

“It is,” Steve says and then the phone line goes silent. Jonathan unbuttons the top of his shirt, sinking into the couch.

“So did you have a reason to be calling, _or_?” he eventually asks when nothing else comes from the dead air lingering in the receiver. The phone line suddenly crackles, the sound of shuffling feet and a clatter of dishware ringing thickly in his ears.

“ _Yeah_ ,” Steve says at long last, and Jonathan thinks he can hear the rush of water, followed by the clanging of something metallic. “I’m picking you up in an hour and we’re going on a date.”

If Jonathan had been drinking something at the moment, he might have choked. Instead what comes out is a wheezy cough, his throat suddenly indescribably dry.

“A _what?_ ”

“A date,” Steve repeats, his voice almost completely drowned out by the angry sounding hits of pots and pans fighting against Steve’s fists in a kitchen sink.

“And why would I go on a _date_ with _you_?” Jonathan asks, voice incredulous.

The sound of the clanging of the dishware stops and there’s a long, drawn out sigh, a sigh that says: _you know, I think you’re a total and complete idiot._

Jonathan almost hangs up on him.

Because Jonathan Byers was not an idiot. Jonathan was far from it. Jonathan had received endless accolades from his time at NYU and had graduated from his program in 1991 with honours.

He had never failed a class. He had never even _skipped_ a class. He had worked hard and took an entry-level job at the _Indianapolis Star_ right out of college after Nancy pointed out the cost of living back in Indiana was far cheaper than making a go of it in New York City. _We can pay off our student loans in five years—six tops_ , Nancy had said as a matter-of-fact. _Plus, we’ll be closer to Hawkins, and won’t your mother like that?_

So Jonathan had moved back to Indiana, rented a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the downtown core and faithfully, if not consciously paid off his debt from college.

He pinned pictures of his life in New York City up on the wall and kept current with the happenings of the city through newsletters from the NYU Alumni Association. He did lunch with Nancy once a week outside the office and they reminisced about his time there. He mentored under Frank, senior photographer for the Arts and Culture section of the newspaper. He took photos of painstakingly mundane events happening around the city, from the yearly _Relay for Hope_ spring marathon to the kitchy _Arts in the Park_ summer festival.

The pictures of New York City on his walls came down.

Frank would tell him about his dog and his wife and Jonathan would return the favour with stories about his drive back to Hawkins every few weeks, just to have a Sunday dinner with his mother.

He stopped reading the NYU Alumni Association newsletter.

“No one serious in your life yet?” Frank would also ask every once in a while.

“No, not really,” Jonathan would say back.

Frank would talk about retiring soon.

“Eloise really wants to visit her parents in Florida,” he would chuckle. “They aren’t getting any younger and neither are we.”

And then Nancy would show up in the breakroom, eyes bright and filled with that same determined energy he had fallen in love with all those years ago, her sharp tongue hidden by the deceptively prim pink of her glossy coloured lips.

“There’s talk of you taking over Frank’s position come spring,” she would say. Sharp fingernails would curl around her mug of coffee, her smile smug in just the smallest sort of way that it didn’t attract the wrong sort of attention. She was proud of him.

So Jonathan would exhale, chuckling softly, a disbelieving half laugh falling from his mouth as he awkwardly shrugged and murmured an unsure sounding, "Yeah, I guess so."

He began looking for houses in Indianapolis. There was one he really liked over near Richmond Hills, but the prices of split level bungalows by Vanderbilt were better.

Then, he went to the yearly office party, got absolutely shitfaced and slept with Steve Harrington.

“Earth to Planet Byers: _hello!_ Are you even listening? We need to sell this act."

Steve's voice slams into him heavy like a semi-truck and Jonathan blinks, his ruminations abandoned in favour of a near silent: “oh”.

“ _Sell_?” he repeats because no, he hadn't been.

“The story,” Steve grits out, “About our engagement and how we met,” he adds. “We have to figure it out before the dinner, or did you forget? Now would also be a good time to decide upon how we plan on announcing our future and _immediate_ break up."

 _Oh, right_ , Jonathan thinks and he almost feels silly about forgetting. Their engagement. The wonderful, amazing, _romantic_ tale of their not so wonderful, not so amazing, not so _real_ proposal. The one a drunken Steve had crafted and _enthralled_ Marg with. The reminder of it is enough to put him in a bad mood and Jonathan feels an inkling of annoyance spread across his gut as he rolls his eyes, sinking deeper into the couch.

“That’s not really a date, then,” he rebukes pedantically.

There’s another loud clang, one that sounds like a frying pan being hit with a hammer and Jonathan winces. He feels like Steve might be doing this on purpose now and he frowns.

“It’s a date,” Steve drolly informs him, and there it is again: the heavy sounding tone of ‘ _you know—I think you’re a total and complete idiot’_ swimming thick in his voice. "Just not the romantic type."

Jonathan sighs and there’s another loud _clang_.

Jonathan really, _really_ wants to strangle him.

Then, abruptly, Steve announces: “I’ll see you in an hour.”

Jonathan doesn’t have time to protest because the phone line clicks dead, the droning buzz of the mocking dial tone singing repetitively into his ear.

"A date," Jonathan scoffs. He doesn't bother to move from the couch until the buzzer to his apartment rings and Jonathan is quick to note with sour tugging frown that Steve is 15 minutes early.

—

The date-not-date starts like this:

Steve refuses to tell him where they're going, only that it's some place that serves cheap drinks and assures him they're guaranteed not to be seen together.

“ _Great_ ,” Jonathan says, but can’t help but to think how it shouldn’t matter if they were seen together or not because this is _not_ a real date, remember Steve?

He doesn’t tell Steve this because he doesn’t want to cause a fight, but they end up arguing during the entire drive anyways.

Steve makes a comment about Jonathan's uptight office wear and Jonathan counters with a comment about Steve's inconsistent timeline.

“You said an hour, Harrington; I could have been showering.”

Steve snipes back with an equally ill-tempered: "With hair like _that_? Unlikely," and then turns on the radio.

It's the Indianapolis Hot 100s station and Jonathan hates it.

When they arrive, Steve parks the car and doesn't wait for Jonathan to exit. Instead, he slams the car door and stalks inside, leaving Jonathan alone to balk at their location.

They’re parked in front of the unsavoury exterior of an old hole-in-the-wall establishment called _The Iron Horse_ , only the ‘e’ is missing from the sign and so is ‘r’, so it reads: _The Iron Ho s_

Jonathan frowns because he's pretty sure he saw this _exact_ bar on the news a few weeks ago and once he’s inside, he makes no effort to hide his discomfort.

"Wasn't this place featured in the recent W5 channel exposé?" he asks, settling onto a bar stool next to Steve. His frown thickens, his fingers feeling sticky after daring to touch the weirdly glossy surface of the laminate bar top. _Gross._

The bartender dumps a bowl of peanuts in front of them and Steve snatches up a handful, cramming them into his mouth.

"The one about where johns' go to find hookers?" Steve then says. Then, before Jonathan can answer him, he pops out a casual: "It was. That's why the drinks here are so cheap. And I'm not buying, by the way."

“Jesus _christ,_ ” Jonathan mutters and Steve scoffs, waving a hand towards the bartender, holding up two fingers. The man drops two shot glasses full of amber coloured liquid in front of him and Jonathan rolls his eyes. The bartender looks to him expectantly and Jonathan purses his lips.

“I’ll take a water,” he tells him politely.

“You sure as hell won’t,” Steve cuts in. “He’ll take the same,” he tells the bartender tightly, ignoring Jonathan completely. “In fact, make his a double.”

The man shrugs, fingering 4 shot glasses onto the bar top and sloshes them full of whiskey.

“I’ll start up a tab,” he tells them gruffly and he drifts towards the register.

“What the _fuck_ , Harrington?” Jonathan snaps when the bartender is out of earshot. “I’m not drinking these.”

Steve, fingers perched around the rim of his first shot glass, rolls his eyes so quickly that they threaten to pop right out of his head.

“Well you sure as hell don’t come to a bar and order _water_ ,” he scoffs. Then, he picks up the shot glass and tips it back into his mouth, swallowing the murky amber liquid all in one go. He grimaces slightly and Jonathan lets out a long lasting sigh, his unimpressed expression mirroring Steve’s. Then, Steve picks up the second shot glass and _oh_ —it's already gone.

“And how is getting wasted on a _weeknight_ supposed to help us figure out a story to sell Marg?” Jonathan asks huffily.

Flippant as perusal, Steve brushes him off.

“It’s not,” he says, pushing one of Jonathan’s shot glasses towards him. The liquid wobbles dangerously, sloshing in a wide circular motion and threatens to spill over the edge. “But at least if I’m drunk I’ll be less likely to want to kill you for getting us into this mess.”

“ _Me?_ You’re the one who told Marg we were engaged!”

“You could be lying about that,” Steve counters, eyes narrowing.

Exasperated, Jonathan lets out a loud, loud sigh.

“Oh my _god,_ I actually want to kill you,” he announces.

Steve scoffs.

“Not if I kill you first.”

“You couldn’t even if you wanted to,” Jonathan shoots back instantly.

“You wanna bet?”

“I kicked your ass back in high school, Harrington. Don’t forget that.”

“ _Hey_ —I apologized for that! _And_ you caught me off guard! That fight in the alley wasn’t exactly fair.”

“It was totally fair—your mouth is just as big as your ego and you have a weak right hook,” Jonathan snaps, eyes squinting. Against his better judgement, he grabs the shot glass sitting in front of him—glowing golden yellow like a beacon of hope in the stormiest of seas—and swallows it back. It tastes like cat piss and burning and Jonathan grimaces.

“Well at least you’re not a _total_ office yuppie,” Steve comments dryly, watching as Jonathan slams the shot glass down on the tabletop. It elicits another sharp eye roll from Jonathan, who rebukes with an unimpressed:

“Yeah? Well what do you do? Still working at the video store?”

Again, Steve scoffs.

“ _No_. I work…” There’s a pause, and Steve grabs one of Jonathan’s shots. Jonathan does the same and without waiting for Steve, tosses it back. “...in construction. On the administration side of things,” Steve eventually finishes.

"That sounds like the same office yuppie bullshit to me," Jonathan says.

"Well it's _not_ ," Steve tells him, lips drawing thin.

There’s something decidedly off about the way Steve says this, from the slowness to his voice to the slight furrow of his brow, but Jonathan doesn’t have the opportunity to ask about it as Steve slams back another shot, letting out a loud, shaky exhale in response to the bad tasting alcohol.

"Classy," Jonathan mutters more to himself then Steve.

"Oh shut _up_ , Byers. For once in your life do you think you could be a little less of an uptight judgemental asshole and a little more laid back? Fuck—you really are an office yuppie."

With two of his four shots left, Jonathan considers his options.

He could do the adult thing and get up and walk out of the bar. He could go home, press his tie, hang up his shirt and make supper. He could make sure the flashbulb on his camera is charged and ready for the location shoot tomorrow at the downtown plaza re-opening. He could take a shower, sit in front of his television, watch the late night news and forget all about Steve's stupid idea of a date-not-date in a bar known for homing a prostitution ring. He could even tell Marg tomorrow at work that Steve died.

He could also prove Steve wrong, making him eat his words—no, _choke_ on them—and come out feeling better for it.

Jonathan picks up the second shot glass sitting in front of him and swallows it back like water. He doesn't let his lip curl in the same way Steve's does, nor does he exhale raggedly like his insides are on fire. Then, he picks up the last one.

"I'm _not_ an office yuppie," Jonathan tells him, tone deeply unimpressed. He brings the shot glass to his lips and watches as Steve raises a brow. He drinks it slowly, the liquid feeling like bad mistakes in the making as it floods his mouth, making his eyes water as it slips down his throat. "I'm a photographer who just so happens to work for a newspaper because it pays the bills. I get stoned on the weekends and travel to Chicago every summer for Lollapalooza. I still listen to underground punk bands and moonlight as a contributor to a music art zine based out of Detroit. _And—,_ " He sets the shot glass down on the bar top almost a little too roughly, the glass making a sharp _tack_ sound as he does. "You better fucking remember these things when we go to dinner on Saturday, because you're _supposed_ to be my fiancé."

Steve sighs and raises his hand, signaling to the bar tender for him to bring them another round.

"Now," Jonathan continues on evenly, eyes narrowing and not allowing Steve a moment to speak. "Let's come up with a story to sell to a post-menopausal gossip monger so I can stand around the water cooler come Monday at my yuppie job with my yuppie tie with my yuppie coworkers where I pretended to be a _yuppie_ until Nancy-fucking-Wheeler decided I should make a political statement and come out as unabashedly homosexual with a fake date at the yearly office party, a date who happens to mildly if not moderately homophobic despite sleeping with a man."

Steve blinks, the lines in his face contorting in tandem to the opening of his mouth, but anything he is about to say is abruptly cut off by the sudden gravelly off-key wailing to the opening lines to Neil Diamond's _Sweet Caroline._

Instantly, both of them swivel in their stools and find a burly, middle-aged man with a salt and pepper beard crooning into a microphone across the empty bar.

"What the _fuck—,"_ Jonathan mouths.

Just then, the bartender sets down another four shots glasses in front of them, lips pursed as his gaze falls beyond their shoulders.

"It's karaoke night," the bartender tells them absently and from the expression on his face he too does not approve of the singing.

"Another reason why the drinks are so cheap," Steve explains.

"I need another shot," Jonathan groans, and Steve, in the smallest, random act of kindness he’s shown Jonathan all night, nudges one towards him.

_—_

The worse keeps getting worse and Jonathan isn’t really sure it’s ever going to get better.

He wakes up in a not-so familiar bed with a semi-familiar body and through his sleep-laden eyes realizes that _yes,_ it’s Steve, and _no,_ he doesn’t remember how he got here again.

Groaning, he sits up, pushing the hair out of his eyes only to realize it’s _crunchy._

“You came on my face!” Jonathan instantly accuses, foot kicking at the corpse-like body lying in the bed next to him. The body responds with a pathetic sounding moan and rolls over. Steve blinks as he looks up to him, tongue running across his sandpaper dry lips, brows knitting together as he frowns, like he’s trying to make sense of what he’s seeing. Then, the realization of what they did hits him and he lets out loud, emphatic:

“ _Fuck!_ Why the fuck are you in my bed again!?”

“You tell me, Steve!”

Steve groans again, grabbing Jonathan’s pillow and presses it against his face in a sad, half-hearted attempt at suffocating himself.

“Fuck,” he hears Steve groan again. “Fuck, fuck, what the _fuck_ —,”

Jonathan sighs, kicking at Steve’s legs again for good measure before crawling out of the bed.

“Save the melodramatics,” he says, rolling his eyes. “We’ve had this conversation before: you’re not gay; I am. We’ll ignore the fact that you did things that don’t match up with this narrative.”

Steve doesn’t respond and continues to exhale soft expletives into the pillow.

“I’m using your shower,” Jonathan tells him, gaze falling to the bedside table clock. It was 10:14 am. He was _supposed_ to have checked in at the office over an hour ago and was _supposed_ to be meeting Frank downtown for the plaza re-opening at noon. “And I need clothes,” he adds, lip curling as he looks at his sweaty, wrinkled dress shirt sitting on the floor on top of Steve’s discarded jeans next to his tie. It had a weird, visible stain on it and Jonathan isn't sure he wants to ask what it could possibly be.

He’s halfway out of the bedroom, a pounding headache from hell making each and every step significantly more difficult, when he pauses.

“Steve?” he asks suddenly, turning back towards the bed.

“ _What_ , Byers?” Steve snaps irritably, tossing the pillow aside. “You can use my shower—I don’t care. Take my clothes too. Hell, take _all_ my clothes, so long as it means we never end up doing _this_ again.” He waves his hand vaguely in the air before it falls flat onto the bed, hitting the mattress with a soft _oompf._

Jonathan squeezes his eyes shut, fingers pinching at the bridge of nose as he resists the urge to strangle him.

“We didn’t come up with a story,” he tells Steve carefully, if not gratingly. “Or if we did, I don’t remember it. Do you?”

All he could remember was the middle-aged man singing _Sweet Caroline,_ a tune that he had returned to frequently in between his equally awful renditions of Steely Dan’s _Dirty Work_ and The Police’s _Roxanne._ None of these memories were particularly helpful.

But if Jonathan had expected Steve to somehow save them and remember what he didn’t, he supposes it was his own fault for even daring to try and hope. Steve remained silent and Jonathan, late getting up, late to work, ejaculation matting his hair, and oh _right,_ hung over, sighs.

Then, after what seems like the longest thirty-seconds of silence all time, Steve asks:

“When’s dinner again?”

“Tomorrow,” Jonathan tells him, blinking. Because _really_ , how could he _forget?_

Steve groans again and grabs the discarded pillow, covering his face in a second half-hearted attempt at self-suffocation. Jonathan watches with mild interest, blinking dully, but doesn’t try to stop him because at least if he was successful he could finally tell Marg that Steve had actually died.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a hot six months, but these two idiots are still navigating the early 90s and office culture (badly, if I might add).


End file.
